Chester County continues employee streamlining'

Facing a changing workplace, a new direction for its parks department, and continuing budget challenges, the Chester County commissioners in July announced that 30 employees would be laid off, further reducing the county’s overall workforce numbers.

According to a county press release, the layoffs – referred to as an “organizational streamlining” – came in the departments of Facilities & Parks, Human Services, and Emergency Services.

A reaction to mounting budget woes, the commissioners said the layoffs are also part of a wider plan to reduce county staffing levels while retaining the delivery of needed services.

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Like others, Chester County has seen a drop in both the amount of revenue it can collect from local property taxes and a deep reduction in what it gets from state and federal sources since the economic meltdown of 2008.

“When the tax base was increasing and the reimbursements from Harrisburg were at a high level, we did not have these kind of layoffs,” commissioners Chairman Terence Farrell said. “But we are faced with the reality we face now and we have to deal with that.”

By year’s end, the budget challenges facing the county would result in the first property tax increase in five years. The commissioners adopted a budget hat called for a 5-percent increase in taxes, equal to about $36 for the median homeowner in the county.

The layoffs in the parks department included its top administrators. County officials said that the positions had become redundant in the wake of an earlier merging of the parks and facilities offices, and later announced that a new, decentralized management of the parks would improve education and recreation programs in individual parks.

This streamlining was undertaken with the involvement of the heads of all three departments, and the changes will not compromise core essential services, the release stated. The estimated annual savings to the county is more than $2 million - $790,000 in Human Services, $665,000 in Emergency Services and $590,000 in Facilities & Parks.

Human Services, the department that receives perhaps the most significant amount of funding from the state, took the largest hit – 13 employees in all: seven in the Department of Aging; two in the Department of Mental Health/Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities; three in the Department of Children Youth & Families; and one that covers the overall Department of Human Services and Children Youth & Families.

The next largest cut came in Emergency Services, which will lose 10 employees, again from clerical and administrative positions and not the call takers and radio dispatchers who deal most directly with the public and emergency responders such as police, fire, and ambulance services.

Over the years when fiscal concerns became paramount, the county has tried to reduce its workforce while not giving up services that residents have come to expect – like emergency services, parks and libraries.

Since 2009, 165 full-time equivalent positions had been eliminated, either through layoffs, attrition, or reconfiguration of departments. The figure is expected to increase to 181 in 2013.